Category Archives: Art Rock

If you’ve ever witnessed a plague of lighthouse keepers or traversed the topographic oceans only to find yourself in the court of the crimson king, you may appreciate what I created for this week’s Articulate e-learning challenge.

Our MC, David Anderson asked us to create an e-learning interaction that used awards and/or progress bars in a creative way to reward learners and show them how far they’ve gotten in a lesson. Well, I thought this challenge being about progress bars, I should create the ultimate PROGress bar (ie: progressive rock, get it?).

So many times when I’ve seen documentaries about popular music or the 1970s in particular, all they ever talk about is punk and disco and totally miss the fact that the major progressive rock bands were selling millions of records and packing the hugest stadiums in the world. It was what Bill Martin aptly labelled a “popular avant garde.”

The PROGress Bar
For my progress bar, I decided to have seven levels of achievement with an illustrious title for each; ranging from Prog Novice to Prog God. I used the sun from the cover of King Crimson’s Larks’ Tongues in Aspic to denote where the learner was in the different levels. So the suns go along the bottom in a row with all of them grayed out except for the current level the learner is on.

Hint, Hint
Knowing that a deep knowledge of progressive rock is generally not the forte’ of most people and that my audience was going to be mostly other e-learning designers, I didn’t want them to get discouraged and opt out of the lesson right away. To remedy this, I added obvious hints to the feedback layer of the questions and gave them two tries to get the right answer.

Being the serious prog-nerd that I am, I had too many questions. Anyone who knows me personally knows I can go on and on about this topic. When I was done, I realized that I HAD to have at least one extra question. So it made sense that to get all the way to Prog God, that the learner should have to answer an additional question to get that ultimate title. To represent where they were at in the lesson, I highlighted one half of the final sun on the PROGress bar.

Original Music
For anyone who’s interested, the music on the introductory slide is a piece I wrote and recorded called “Satisfaction.” It was supposed to be one of those epic 20 minute tunes, but is yet to be completed. At any rate, enjoy the lesson and definitely let me know what you think!